In the paper that I read to the Third International Congress of Classical Studies in London in 1959 I tried to delimit the sphere of human reflexion and freedom of decision, as opposed to the sphere of divine intervention, in Homeric poetry. The conclusion I reached was that there was a mutual and often indissoluble fusion of these two spheres. In trying here to say something about the significance of personal decision in the dramas of Aeschylus, I am in fact continuing my inquiry in a different literary genre. But the problems are basically the same: in both cases the question is what significance the poet ascribes to the personal decisions of the human agent within the frame-work of a basically God-governed ‘Welt-bild’, how the limitations upon his freedom are defined, and what degree of responsibility is thus entailed.

I began the previous paper with my thanks to Bruno Snell, who was the first to clarify these problems of free human action with which we are faced in epic poetry, and I must now begin by thanking him again. Professor Snell, in his book Aischjlos und das Handeln im Drama, which appeared in 1928, emphatically placed the personal decision of the human agent in the centre of his interpretation of Aeschylus; he even went so far as to regard a decision based on free choice as the most important element in the development of a genuinely tragic conflict. I cannot enter upon the history of these problems; however, I should like to emphasise the importance of the question and the interest it has recently aroused in scholarly discussion.